The Beast of Space | Page 5

about him so that he was helpless.
The girl was slipping off Nat's shoulder. He could not raise the stump of an arm to balance her; it was stiff and useless. He stopped firing long enough to make the shift, even as the spheres attacked again. The bolts had put out the lights in fully half of the marauders but the others came on unafraid.
Nat straddled Digger's writhing body, held the spacehound motionless between his legs. At short range, he seared off the imprisoning tentacles, knowing that it would take far more than a heat-bolt to damage the well-nigh impregnable creature. He swooped the dog up under his good arm and fled from the madly-pursuing spheres, thanking nameless deities that the gravity here permitted such herculean feats. The spheres rolled faster, he soon found, than he could jump; so long as he was above them, all was well, but by the time the weak gravity permitted him to land, they were waiting for him. He tried zig-zagging. Good! It worked. He eluded them up to the mouth of the cave, then jumped for the door of his ship's outer airlock.
* * * * *
Nat placed the girl in his bunk, removed the cumbersome spacesuit. Her eyes blinked faintly, then sprang open. But they did not see him; they were staring straight ahead. Her mouth opened and shut weakly as though she were speaking, but no sound issued from it. He brought her water, but when he returned she had fallen asleep. He returned to the kitchen to prepare some food.
"You're still running around in that pillow case," he remarked to Digger as he extracted the spacehound from it. "Attend me, now. We know why and how those people disappeared. It would take the Space Patrol ship at least a month to arrive here; I don't intend to perch on the back of this devil as long as that. And if we leave, old thing, it'll just lure other chivalrous fools to very unpleasant ends.
"And we've got to get this kid back to civilization. She needs a doctor's care, preferably a doctor with two arms."
Digger's vibrations were one of general approval.
"We could poison it," he went on. "Only I'm not a chemist; even if I knew the compounds contained in that reeking stomach I wouldn't know what would destroy them. Might blow it up, but we haven't enough explosive.
"No, we'll have to get down into the thing's insides again. In fact--" He paused suddenly, mouth open. "Congratulate me, Digger! I have it!"
The smell of burning vegetables cut short his soliloquy. He fed the starved, half-blind girl, then left her sleeping exhaustedly as he squirmed into his suit.
No sooner had he entered the mouth of the cave than a half-dozen of the singing sensory organs rolled quickly, yet not angrily, toward him. The beast was apparently optimistic, for the globes sang in their most soothing, seductive tones. They tried to herd him into the first cave on the right, but he had remembered the squeaker; they could not distract him.
Effortlessly he leaped over them toward the mouth of the cave on the left. That was where the spaceships lay, pointing in all directions like a carelessly-dropped handful of rice.
All the ships were in running order. Good; had there been one vessel he could not move, then all was lost. The fuel in several ran low, but after a few moments of punching levers and pulling chokes, the under rockets thundered in the big room.
Taking care not to injure the motor compartments of the other ships, using only the most minute explosion-quantities, he jockeyed each ship around until all their noses pointed in one direction. The exhausts pointed out through the wide doorway. It was well that the beast had formed curved corners in the room, otherwise the scheme would not have worked. The exhausts which did not point toward the door, directly, were toward the curved walls which would deflect the forceful gasses expelled doorward.
When he emerged from the ship, the spheres attacked. He seared off their tentacles throughout what seemed to be eternities. His body was becoming a mass of bruises from the lash of their tentacles. He burned his way through the swarm on to ship after ship.
As he stepped from the last vessel there was a rumbling beneath his feet. Did the monster understand his intent? Was it stirring in its shell? Most of the globes had disappeared; now a nauseatingly sweet odor penetrated the screen in his headpiece, which permitted him to smell without allowing the oxygen to escape. He hurried around to the rear of the ship, an apprehensive, sickening feeling at the pit of his stomach. A thick jelly-like wave of liquid was rolling over the floor--the reeking, deadly juices from the beast's stomach. If the liquid